Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 853: The New Dark Age

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad.

It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. Today is whatever day. It's gonna be the is no welcome at today is whatever day. It's going to be the 14th of July. Today's the 14th of July. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's well before. It's like a month before that.

It's Juneteenth. But we're recording in advance. We have to record so we can take a little time off. Take a break. But we're doing a long form today, a long form article today, very specifically on a Monday show, because we thought, you know what, let's do a long form today, a long form article today, very specifically on a Monday show, because we thought, you know what, let's do a long form article,

one that will hold until that time. It's perfectly fine, because it's held up until now we read it, and it'll continue to hold. It's not like this is gonna change any. Yeah, there's not gonna be a change of heart that we're all looking back and being like, man, that article called

the new dark age that Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself. There's not going to be in a month where you're like, you know what? It's interesting how they reverse course on that. It's crazy how they're now funding all this cancer research. So this is a really interesting article that, I mean, it really is, you know, we talked about it a few shows again, referred back to it, like there is an intentionality to the Trump administration's attack on

the institutions of knowledge at every level, at every level. At every level. And there's an intention to that that consolidates power through ignorance, right? And this article does a really good job of explaining how multi-pronged and how multifaceted and also just how dangerous and how fundamental

to the functioning of a democracy this attack is. It's a really good article. It's a shortish article. I will, by the time this is out, I will have read it for patrons. So they'll be, it'll be available for you guys to listen to, to listen to me read it. It's also, if you're a subscriber to the Atlantic, you can read it and listen to it there. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting article. What struck me the most when I was hearing,

cause there's a litany, they go through a whole litany of things that are being, like institutions that are being attacked. So they're going after all kinds of higher education institutions. They're defunding these institutions or attacking them, making them crawl on the carpet and then being like, well, you didn't do it hard enough, do it harder. Do it harder next time.

I want you to feel how embarrassed you should be about what you're doing to yourself. You're turning yourself into a clown and you're gonna do it harder next time. I want you to feel how embarrassed you should be about what you're doing to yourself. You're turning yourself into a clown and you're gonna do it for me. And I'm gonna make you fucking, I'm gonna squeeze your nose in front of everybody. I'm gonna walk up and be like, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I'm gonna fucking like squeeze your nose. Then there's removal of anybody who happens to be a person of color in many different of these positions of power. They talk about the Library of Congress, how they removed the person who was in power there, who was in charge there, they happen to be a person of color,

and a woman, they remove that person. They're like, we're gonna get rid of them. So they're erasing, you know, black and brown people as much as they can. There's a removal of people in the government who are doing research. Research is one of those things, and we'll touch on it, I'm sure, a little bit,

but briefly, research by the government often is done because it's a loser economically for a lot of people. So research gets done by the government because it's good to have that research in the country, because if you can do it here, then an American company will pick up that afterwards and make money and it's good for everybody involved and it's

great and it's a loser economically, so it's great for the people to do it. And then there's cancer research and there's data collection that's also being removed and stopped. People are stopping to do data collection, et cetera, et cetera. And what struck me about this, and we'll get into all these little facets as we work our way through the article, but what struck me as an overall view,

when I look at this in a 30,000 foot view, the first thing that occurred to me is life and understanding of the world is never gonna be less complicated than it is now. It's never gonna be tomorrow where we have a less, unless there's like a fucking nuke or something. Because tomorrow's not gonna be less complicated than today. Think about when you were a kid,

like Hal, just even think about like when we were just getting out of college. And you'd go out to the store and you got your CompuServe PC because they paid $400 and you got a copy served PC that allowed you to get a brand new PC. And think about how complicated life was just with, you know, having a, now you have a computer at home.

Now look at how far we are advanced from just having a computer at home. You have a computer in your hand. You have a computer. This computer is probably, it's probably as powerful or close to as powerful as the PCs we had when we got out of college. You know what I mean? It's in the palm of our hand. It's certainly more usable. It's certainly easier to use. Now it might not be as powerful in some ways. I don't know if that's possible. I don't know the computing

power, et cetera, but I think like maybe it's not as powerful in certain ways, but it's certainly a lot more usable. Certainly a lot easier to use. I can get to places on the internet with this thing or apps on this thing so quickly in comparison to while long it would take me to do those things before. So your world's not getting less complicated. These things aren't getting,

it's not like a generation like us who grew up with tapes and now has, you know, like we're talking about a couple episodes like tapes to CDs, CDs to mp3s now back to records and then back to CDs and all this back and forth. It's we have this amazing Society that is that is fueled by information. Mm-hmm. So if I dumb my population down, it's not like the rest of the world is gonna be like, oh, well, yeah, we should all be stupider. The rest of the world, especially places like China

and places in Europe and other places, they're gonna exceed, far exceed what the United States can do if you stupid us down. If you dumb us down for four years while Trump is in office, you're just four years behind. It's not like, and it's not like those four years are done and we switch off and we're caught back up. You're four years behind.

You're four years behind on all this stuff. You've dumbed down this population enough, so now you've gotta catch back up. So the constant dumbed down this population enough. So now you've got to catch back up. So the constant dumbing down of our society is going to be a real detriment for us in the future. It's not like, you know, this idea is like these fucking industrial jobs are going to come back. That's what we're talking about. We're going to, we're going to have a bunch of industrial jobs and they're all going to come. That's not, that's stupid. That's never going to happen. It's all information now. And if you keep on stifling information, you're not brokering anything

Right, you don't have anything to broker. What are you gonna do? Now? You're playing catch-up to a different country's AI You know so many so many things that you said are real interesting to me I want to touch on a couple of them like I Think like when you say like we're four years behind, I would suggest that maybe four years is 10 years. Sure. I do wonder, and I don't know shit about fucks, but I do wonder if like knowledge and information

and the pace of that means that like falling behind is a nonlinear catch up. Yeah. You know? It's not exponentially hard to catch up. Right. And so, and I think that there may be some truth to that It's some shit. I just made up right now, but it feels like it feels very true

If it keeps on accelerating, yeah, then you've got a like it's like that Zeno's paradox with the arrow or whatever It's like it's like that like no matter what I'm never actually gonna get there Yeah, because you've already doubled your speed right in the time for me to catch up So in what I thought was four years is now six, but now you're two more years. And now it's now I've got to do- And you're moving faster than that. You're moving faster.

And the whole time it's a moving target. So I think we have this, and I've said this before about a lot of things with respect to the Trump administration. Like there is an idea that is false, that what we break we can fix and that in four years we can make a new choice and that we can just, but that is just objectively not true.

What is broken cannot always be fixed. If we fall behind, we cannot always catch up. There is not a guarantee that like, if we fuck this up and we are, that we can make it be okay later by working harder or making different choices. It is very much the essence, and I hate to do this, but I'm gonna do it anyway. It is very much the essence of 1984,

the Orwellian book about dystopia, that the thrust of that book's dystopian authoritarianism stems from their need, desire, and effectiveness at controlling information, right? They control information. Now, they use a lot of physical violence and strong arming in order to do it, but that doesn't matter that much.

What matters is that we recognize that to control information is to control the populace. Yeah. You were, you know, the Trump administration is intentionally controlling and reducing access to knowledge. And I have been wondering like this obsession, this obsession with destroying like what they would consider DEI or woke ideology or, you know, race and gender, et cetera.

Like, I think that there are strong. Misogynist and racial elements to that. But I also think that there might be a truth to the idea that it almost doesn't matter what we control. Once we begin the process of the control of knowledge and we begin to consolidate the idea that knowledge should be controlled by the government and we get people to accept that if the wedge is woke ism if the wedge is de I if the wedge is gender, then what we do is we do that same executive power creep that has happened with economics and military, et cetera. We say that knowledge itself, knowledge itself should fall under the purview and control of government.

Once we do that, we've seeded everything. We've seeded literally everything because knowledge should always be democratized. If we move away from the idea of democratizing knowledge because it fits into this bucket of undesirable knowledges, that idea that we could have knowledge, which is undesirable, is so anti-democratic. It's so anti-intellectual. It's so anti everything we should and have stood for. I wonder if that's just like,

if the powers that be are like, well, the American people will accept that. And once we do that, then we get everything we want. Yeah. I wonder too, like, here's what I think is happening. I think that the goal might all be the same, but I think the motivations are different, right? I think for the people that are rich,

they're happy to see a populace that allows them to continue to get tax cuts over and over and over again, because they're easy to convince to give them tax cuts, right? The American people are easy to convince in that way, and so if they make a population that doesn't question, it's easy to keep continue making more and more money and keep getting away with things and not have to, and also make more money in lots of other different ways.

Right, like you think about, I think about how the EPA might hamstring someone in a certain, if there's a certain administration in there, but in other administrations, they have carte blanche to do whatever they want. They could dump whatever they want, make whatever they want, create terrible sites, et cetera, et cetera.

And that doesn't, that's income for them, right? It's income for me, if I don't have to pay attention to the things that I'm doing as hard as I did in a different administration, et cetera. So for the billionaires, there's something there and what they want is they want a dumb group of people that are going to vote. Same thing goes for the other politicians that are on the other side that are constantly, we've talked about how their bread is buttered.

So they just keep doing the same thing over and over again to continue on getting tax cuts for billionaires because they get a lot of money there. They can make sure that, you know, that they have this country, whether or not they believe with that Christian ideology or not, it doesn't matter. The Christians also believe it

and wanna have and see this thing. And then they find Trump who was wronged and is willing to break everything in his path. And all they have to do is nudge him to what they want broken. Mm-hmm So does Trump care really about whether or not? Harvard is doing a thing that he no, I don't think he cares But I think what he wants to do is show people that he's in charge now Yeah But I think what he wants to do is show people that he's in charge now. And so he's an easy bull to shove down and push towards whatever they want to broken down, whatever they want to run down.

They just aim him at that. And he is a type of person who's been rung by the government. So any facet of the government they want removed, all they have to do is whisper that poison in his ear and he will destroy it for them. All, you know, so look at all the regulation stuff. Where did that go immediately? Think about all that. All the, all the money that they're going to save on any kind of soft power, that's

going to go directly to billionaires. All the regulation that's going to make billionaires more, more wealthy. So they're doing these things. They're whispering all this stuff to him because he's the wrecking ball they need for this. He's the part, he's like genetically created and allowed to be the worst possible person for the United States. And for any, I mean, for any kind of social safety net, for any of that, I mean, I don't think I'm wrong.

No, I don't think you're wrong either. I'm just having some thoughts as you're talking like this. Is it like, I think you're, I think you're, I think you're so right. It's, it's kind of frightening. Like it's a convergence. Yeah. I'm seeing a convergence. I'm seeing a bunch of people that are all want something

pretty much the same thing, which is a stupid population. And they all can use Trump to get it in an easy way. Yeah, I think Trump is this like unique weapon that is supported by this populist bullshit and that the worm tongues that you're describing, the corporate worm tongues that are really driving here are able, because Trump has no real, he's unique in that he has no real morals or ideology

or principles. He's never been a guy from all accounts. He's never been a guy that has operated on principles. You and I are used to, I think, thinking about people in terms of what they believe. But Trump has never been a person who's operated on a belief system that is anything other than winning-based.

Like, what is the task or the game or the fight in front of me, and how do I win? So as long as the sort of forces that really are shaping the country can see that he doesn't care as long as he wins, then they can paint a picture for him of, Harvard is winning if you don't do this thing. You're gonna let Harvard be more powerful than you?

And then all of a sudden, oh, and now he does care. He cares very much, but he doesn't care. And we've seen this in his fights with individuals. His willingness to vilify, look at his relationship, actually a really good example, is his relationship with Ted Cruz. When Ted Cruz was running in the primary,

he painted Ted Cruz and Ted Cruz's father and Ted Cruz's family in this really horrifying light. Really like Ted Cruz's father killed JFK. I mean, just like crazy, crazy stuff. But he never believed it. Believing stuff is outside the point. It's not even important to the consideration. That makes him to your point, such a useful tool,

such a useful weapon of these people. And the destruction of knowledge, that the intentional breaking down of the institutions that democratize information, that feed information, that look at the foundations and fundamentals of how the world works. Like, we break that stuff. I don't know how we get that stuff back.

Like, it's's interesting Cecil, because like when the neocons were in charge, we knew who the puppets were that were pulling W strings, right? You could look at them, you'd be like, fucking it's Dick Cheney, it's Don Rumsfeld, it's, I can't remember the other guy's name. There's three guys that were primarily in charge

of pulling those strings. And so we all knew who those guys were. I think with the Trump administration, one thing that I'm discovering as I'm looking is he's so malleable that so many different people are manipulating him at once. It's not that there's a set of like worm tongues like there were with the neoc cons where you're like, okay, you know

W was always a stand-in useful idiot the real people in charge or this like cadre of neo cons and they're really just he's just Putting this shit forward with Trump. It's it's Russia It's sometimes North Korea. It's, you know, these big businesses. It's the Peter Teals. It's the tech bros. The billionaire tech bros, yeah. Yeah. They're all able to inflame his sense

of like reactionary anger and small, like smallness. Yeah. And get him to like act on their behalf. And he has no idea that he's a fucking tool. Yeah. I, it, it, it definitely, when I think about it though, I think about these people from Project 2025 and how they're manipulating him.

And really genuinely it benefits all those people to make stupid people here in the United States. Because the Project 2025 people, they're anxious to see that, you know, like any kind of thing that centers white males is something that they're going to make sure that happens. And so anything that centers anyone else is gonna get destroyed.

And it's easy to manipulate Trump to do that. And they even mentioned the Peter Thiels and the types of tech bros in this article where they're like, yeah, those people, they do. Sure. Do they want smart people? Yeah. But we're still going to create some smart people. What they want is smart, broken people. What they want is smart, easy to manipulate people. So they're happy if you know how to do a task really well. What they don't want is an individual thinker. And that's what we're going to run into is a ton of people that might be able to do a task really well. What they don't want is an individual thinker. And that's what we're gonna run into,

is a ton of people that might be able to do some tasks well, but not a lot of individual thinkers, because look at what they're taking down in the colleges. Look at what they're going after in the colleges. They want everybody to think all the same stuff. They don't want anybody else to have any kind of, you know, we're recording this hilariously on Juneteenth, right? Right, yeah. And I know this might feel like it's a dated episode, but this is, I mean, we're recording this hilariously on Juneteenth, right? Right. Yeah.

And I know this might feel like it's a dated episode, but this is, I mean, this is all still happening. It's not like it's not still happening tomorrow, but like we're recording this on Juneteenth. And I think it's a really interesting thing because like, this is a thing that might not exist as a holiday next year. We talked about it when we recorded this for the main show, on the same day, we might not exist next year. Who the hell knows what's going to happen? And if project 2025 has its way, it won't exist next year. If the people who are in charge who want to wipe away any centering of anyone else that isn't that isn't a white dude, they will get rid of it as quickly as possible. And that's just one thing.

That's just one aspect of our, you know, they're talking about how in West Point, they will get rid of it as quickly as possible. And that's just one thing. That's just one aspect of our, you know, they're talking about how in West Point, they're like, they are really changing ideas in curriculum to remove any touchy or difficult subjects. How do you, the one thing that always surprised me is there's this lie that we've been told for God Tom since we started working on this podcast That there's a marketplace of ideas. We've been told this by a lot of people

There's a marketplace of ideas and we take this marketplace and then we like action figures bang them into each other Right, we smash them into each other and whichever action figure comes out without it with its with all its arms still on That's the one that wins. And we were told this lie by all these people and people who were atheist, like sort of leaders, the heads of state in the atheist community at the time were the ones who were talking to Sam Harris was talking about this marketplace of ideas. All these people who were, you know, this sort of logical, rational group of people were saying, no, there needs to be a marketplace of ideas where we all meet and we all decide and we all say,

no, we're not going to do Islam because Islam's stupid. We're not going to do that because that's backwards thinking. But we get to this point where there is no marketplace of ideas because if there was a marketplace of ideas, you would teach the shit that's controversial. Right. And then your side would win out. Your side would win out and say, that's not that big a deal. Because you could make your point because it's a marketplace.

And if your point is better than my point, then your, it doesn't matter argument is better than my, we need to pay attention to all those bad things that happened in history and try to learn from our mistakes. You got a better argument. Your argument will fucking face fuck my argument. But instead, you hide that stuff. Well, what does that say about you? If you hide it, that means you don't wanna confront it.

Right. The marketplace of ideas concept is a fine concept, but I think what I didn't really understand is the delicacy of the foundations that are required to support that concept. In order for us to have a marketplace of ideas, we have to have these preconditions in place. And if we, what we've seen from the Trump administration

is an attack on those preconditions. So for the marketplace of ideas to thrive and to be effective, we have to have a space where difficult ideas, ideas that require us to contend with moral issues which are uncomfortable are able to exist, right? Those spaces need to be able to exist. But anything that is uncomfortable or difficult,

like that shit like is under threat right now by the right. The right is says like, well, we don't want to teach American history if American history forces us to contend with a past which is not past, a past which is not truly gone, a past which is so recent that if I were to understand it, I would be able to see the way it impacts me today. What instead they have is a marketplace of ideas

that intentionally centers white male grievance. If we do anything short of centering white male grievances, those ideas are shunted off to the side, those ideas are kicked. And the the side. Those ideas are kicked. And the same is true of scientific concepts. Any concept that doesn't serve the business interests that are oligarchically in control right now, those ideas are also being kicked out of the marketplace.

The marketplace is delicate. The marketplace was always delicate. It's that saying that like, you know, reality has a left-wing bias. Well, reality has a left-wing bias if you are biased against what scientific data shows. Reality has a left-wing bias if you say, I don't want to contend with the fact

that America has a racially problematic history that feeds to the present. If you, those are true things that like, you don't have to be a scholar to know, but we are destroying scholarship. We are defunding these things. We are removing our ability to think about and contend with these ideas,

specifically because those ideas in the marketplace are winning. Yeah. When they were winning, like the right was like, well, fuck, we can't have climate change. There have been studies where like people were like, I'm a climate change skeptic and I'm going to fund this study to debunk it. And every single time that has happened, they're like, oh shit, actually that's fucking real. Reality itself is now under attack.

That's what's happening. There's a bad idea that we can get in a room and have a debate and debate will tell us what's true. Debate doesn't tell you what's true. Debate, you've talked about this a lot. Debate tells you who debates better. That's what debate does. Debate is not a way to come to truth.

Debate is a way to decide who is the better rhetorician. Yeah, yeah. And what you have on one side is a side that is emotionally appealing to a large swath of people in the United States. And it's emotionally appealing because they're afraid that they're not centered anymore. They're afraid that they're not the ones who are part,

like this country isn't about me anymore. I don't know that I like it as much. This band doesn't reach me like they used to. Yeah. You know, like one thing that I'm thinking too, as we're talking, cause there's a line from this article, Cecil, where it talks about specifically

about how the tech industry, they do want, and you pointed this out, they want educated workers, but they want those workers to be essentially good automatons, to be capable of producing what the tech industry wants to produce. But to really do that in a way that is reminiscent in many ways of industrial workers.

Like get on the factory line, shut your fucking mouth and produce this thing. And like, it used to be that that was kind of impossible. Right? Because to produce somebody who was intelligent enough and not intelligent enough, to produce somebody that was educated enough to produce this kind of work

meant that they also received an education that was generally liberalizing. Now, if we can produce a worker who has not been liberalized, who has been in fact radicalized to the right, but is still capable of producing this work, what we've essentially done is we've produced an automaton that is useful for the tech industry

to produce its product, but which will not question how that product damages or interferes or interacts with society in ways that are morally reprehensible or challenging. And I think too, that one of the ways, just thinking out loud right now in the moment, like one of the ways that this is being done is if we center white male grievance,

we distract those people from the ways in which they are hurt by the same society they helped to produce and build. Patriarchy hurts men, not just women. Patriarchy is a pyramid. And there are very few people at the top of that patriarchy pyramid, right? And you just, you know this by cutting the pie. You see, you can actually look and see how much,

how much it hurts men to have a society that is patriarchal because very few are at the top of that pyramid. Women are of course hurt more, but men are hurt too. But if what we can do is center white male grievance, we will not pay attention to the ways in which the systems that we are a part of hurt us, because we'll be too busy feeling hurt by others and trying to hurt them in turn or take from them in turn.

And I wonder too, because now that I think about it, you know, there's this, we've said, I think multiple times and it's been said by other people that like, every single proclamation is a confession, right? So every attack is a confession. And one of the resounding things you hear is you're a snowflake, you're hurt by this, you're mad, you're a snowflake. You're hurt by this. You're mad. You're a snowflake.

And I wonder how much this damages them so that it's enough to make them, they're willing to take everything down with them. They're willing to take it all down and to make us less of a country. Less, I mean, because when you take away education, you're making your country less. When you delete education from the country, you're making yourself less. You need to be able to understand and grapple with all things in the world to

make yourself a more well-rounded person. If you try to delete those things, you're not going to be well, you're not going to understand them. You're not going to be well rounded. You're just going to, you're going to hamstring yourself. And I wonder how much they're willing to, like, like cut away of the American experience. Right. Yeah. Cecil, I think too, this is a great conversation because it's like I had these things I wanted to talk about, but I don't want to talk about any of them. I want to talk about this stuff now, like, because it's like, I had these like things I wanted to talk about, but I don't wanna talk

about any of them, I wanna talk about this stuff now. Like, cause it's like having these ideas, like as we're talking, like, you know, I am, here's what I'm wondering about. I'm wondering that the university system, to your point you were just making, it used to do this intentional act of producing a well-rounded person.

It didn't matter what I went to school for. I was still gonna take English and history and I was gonna take a variety of coursers because the idea was always that a well-rounded thinker is a better, more valuable thinker to put into the world. So whether I majored in theoretical physics or whether I majored in English lit or whether I majored in business,

I was gonna take this certain core group of courses and they were going to be there for no other reason. They're not like aiming me toward my major, right? They were not there for any other reason than because the idea was that a well-rounded thinker is a more valuable thinker to put into society. I'm thinking, Cecil, that step one of all of this is to begin looking at college and universities

as trade schools. That what they will do instead is they will produce a more narrow educational result in order to produce a worker into a system. So if I come out of high school, and instead of going into the college or university system and getting this sort of like more well-rounded, I'm not even saying necessarily liberal arts,

but a more well-rounded education, if instead I move into a university or college system that fast tracks me right to a job by feeding me a skillset, rather than teaching me the tools of critical thinking, how much more valuable is that to the powers that are in control? They get more workers producing product for them quicker,

an intellectual product for them quicker with less critical thinking and less forethought. That seems to me to be the next cut, like the next thing I would do. If I were the evil, if I was stroking my cat in my fucking volcano lair, like I would damage the integrity and the trust put in the university system,

then I would put forth an alternative to the university system, which is designed to get people out of high school and into work faster, into jobs faster, that produces specialized degrees and cuts away the DEI. And what do you cut away as DEI? English lit. Because it helps you understand the viewpoints and worldviews of other more diverse people. Why bother reading Romeo and Juliet? Or why bother reading Ta-Nehisi Coates? Why bother reading Maya Angelou? We're not gonna do that. You're gonna be a computer programmer Just go to school to be a computer programmer. Just go to school to be an AI

Large language model trainer just go to school to be a cyber security expert. Let's just get you in and get you out Why are you wasting money on all this woke bullshit? Yeah, it's a waste of money It's and it's like yeah, it is if all we want to produce is Automatons on the fucking assembly line but if what we want to do is look at education like we always have as Producing a well-rounded thinker. Well, I don't think that's I think that is Antithetical to the goals of the oligarchs. And so I think the destruction of the sort of knowledge as its own good, which is what we're starting to really see,

the knowledge as its own good, anti-intellectualism, the destruction of the university, the unfunding and defunding of like science across the board and the arts across the board. I think all of this is the edge, right? It's the wedge in the door. And I would not be surprised in a handful of years if we saw a different kind of educational system take hold.

I'm reminded of a factoid from a long form article we just read that you're more likely to be a Democrat if you read a book in the last year. Yeah, man, one book. One book. One book, it's predictive. And I'm reminded of all the kids I went to college with who all said the same thing,

which was like, I shouldn't have to do this, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna go to this, because I obviously spent a lot of time in philosophy classes, right? So there was always someone in those philosophy classes who didn't want to do it, who thought this was navel gazing, who thought it was trash,

who didn't want to read the books, who didn't want to have to do this work. They just wanted to do their, they just wanted to go to business school. What do I need to read Plato for? I don't need to read this. Why am I here? And I'm sure you dealt with the exact same thing, right?

As an English kid, you spent your time with a dozen other kids in every single class who this was their elective. It was your degree, it was their elective. And that's how I spent a lot of my time. So I heard a ton of these grievance even back then. It was just 20 years ago now where kids were upset. They were mad.

They didn't want to have to do this stuff. I don't want to have to write a paper on Plato. Why do I have to write a paper on Aristotle? Why do I have to write a paper on Nietzsche? Why do I have to do this stuff? This is all garbage. And those people are in power now. Those people are in power now.

And it's not because they're anti-electual, it's cause they realize that that's, that there's the real power. The real power is if I can nudge you away from thinking on your own, then I get to tell you what to think. And it's so much easier that way, if I don't have to contend with your thoughts

to put my own in your head. These are people who like, read the allegory of the cave and learn to weaponize it. Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah. And one of the ways you weaponize the allegory of the cave is to make sure nobody else reads it.

Yeah. Yeah, make sure no one else reads it and you're the shadow puppet. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting to be, it's almost like here's what's pernicious is in many ways, it gives the people what they want. Right? Like I took classes in college.

I did not want to take, but those classes that I took in college certainly impacted me, right? Because I learned things, whether I wanted to or not. Yeah. Like we, when we move into a, and we talk about this just outside of the educational system, but when we begin moving into a world, like this article posits is occurring right now, that destroys all from every angle, from every facet, whether it's the scientific world, the university world,

the arts world, the educational world, when those attacks are coming from the outside into all of the places where knowledge feeds out, where education feeds out, where knowing stuff is valued, the people who are in control decide, oh, you're happier not knowing. You can know the things we tell you to know. We'll tell you a history about yourself

that is different than true, but you'll not even have access to knowing that that's different than true. Think about a world where we don't teach people about the Trail of Tears. And now imagine that that happens for an entire cohort of kids that grow up and leave high school and go into college,

and they never learn about the Trail of Tears and they never learn about any of that. Now, these people are in charge and they are going to contend, for example, with issues of native sovereignty because those issues will continue to come up. How will they react differently to those issues of native sovereignty

than somebody who grew up understanding the history that underlies why we even have a reservation system in the first place and how that came to be. And like, you know what I mean? There's a hundred examples of that thing. There's a hundred examples of that. Imagine somebody moving into human resources management, for example, that has no idea of the history of race in this country

or no idea of the history of gender and civil rights in this country. And now they're in a position within a large company as a human resources manager. And they have to contend with employees who are being discriminated against based on, you know, based on whether or not they're a part of a protected class or category.

How will those people react to that? These histories matter. These things inform who we are, but they inform, you know, they underlie the decisions that we make in our understanding of those decisions and whether or not we are going to pursue grievances that other people bring to us.

There's real effects here and none of this is an accident. It's all intentional. Yeah, I'm reminded of that movie, Idiocracy, right? But the difference between Idiocracy and today is like the people in idiocracy, like there's this famous line from Plato, or it's from Socrates, Socrates saying like, I at least know that I know nothing, right?

That's actually a smart person who says, well, I don't know a lot. At least the people in an idiocracy didn't know enough and had to reach out to a smart person to help them. What we're creating is the idiocracy without the smart people. Jesus Christ. Or the smart people are very, very, very manipulative and want to basically control everything. So they're creating a group of dumb people to follow them to do whatever they want.

And those are the two options. Either you're going to create, because like, I don't see how this doesn't backfire eventually. I don't see how this doesn't backfire on everybody. I don't see how, how eventually the United States falls so far behind that we're, that we destroy ourselves. Yeah. Because you're going to fall too far behind and you're not going to have any kind of economic drivers in this country to actually do anything. And so if you keep dumbing down the population, what you get is, you know, a group of yokels who don't have any economic driving

and are just grievance upset. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what do you get? You get a country that's gonna fall apart. It'll eventually attack itself. It'll eventually tear itself apart. Because if you, and it's all because, and it literally all stems from this destruction

and pointed attack on higher education, on medicine, on research, on all these things, it's pointed attack on all those things. And one of the things we haven't touched on is the accountability section. There's a piece of this where they talk about one of the things they're tearing down is ways in which they can be held accountable

after their term is up, right? They're taking down all these data sets, these ideas, like, you know, like places where we go and record what happens, they're undercutting these things so that there's just not anybody there to hold them to account when this is all over. Because if we do happen to wake up and we do happen to get somebody in there who wants to change things, you've not only got to change a ton of things that they've already broken and you've got to rebuild all those things, you've not only got to change a ton of things that they've already broken and you've got to rebuild all those things because how do you rebuild a Department of Education if you've gutted it? How do I rebuild all these departments that they've gutted? I've got to go back to the drawing

board and rebuild those. You can't rebuild them quickly. And so now I've got to build these things up and all the ways in which we were holding them to account, you don't have record of that anymore. All that stuff's gone. All that stuff got removed because they don't want to be held to account. So when it comes time four years from now, if we don't have an independent counsel that can pay attention to the economy

and know sort of where everything is, if that's all gone and underfunded or ripped out, and there's only just the government to tell you the economy's great no matter what's happening, what does that do for their chances next time around, if they remove all the ways in which they can be held accountable? Yeah, you know, this article does,

this article talks about, you know, divorcing things like government spending from GDP and like playing these sort of like tricks in order to tell the people we've always been at war with Eurasia, right? But like what you were pointing out too, and it's like destroying the records. If you don't think that's real,

we all laughed at Signalgate, but there was nothing funny about Signalgate. There was nothing funny about that because like, There was nothing funny about that. Because like, it is, it is the, you have to go into Signal and set a setting in Signal that says I want this shit deleted after a certain number of days. That was set.

That was the destruction, the intentional destruction of exactly the kind of record keeping and who made the decisions and who was in the room and how were those decisions made If we destroy that shit We can't we can't look and say alright. How do we hold your point like the article? Like how do we hold these people accountable? We're on the cusp. It's June 19th. I don't know what's gonna happen when this comes out we're on the cusp of Deciding whether or not the United States is going to become militarily involved with Iran in the conflict right now

between Iran and Israel and whether or not Iran is gonna have this nuclear enrichment program. We're on the cusp of that decision. Maybe it'll be made today or tomorrow, I don't know. But when we're recording that, that decision hasn't been made. No responsible person though could think about this problem without thinking about history,

without thinking about Iraq and how did that go? And what was the power vacuum problem that was presented there? And Syria and Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East where when those regimes were destabilized, power vacuums created problems, right? It would be impossible, Afghanistan, it would be in the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan. And so it's impossible to think critically about the present without understanding history. If we don't have access to the past, we can't hold people accountable

for their decisions. Accountability requires information. It requires it. You can't do it by guessing. I can't hold you account by guessing. I have to have precise ideas of what you did wrong and how you did it in order to hold you account. And if you just remove those, what happens?

Yeah. Nothing good, man. This goes deeper than just defunding an Ivy League institution. Right. This is deeper than that. This is a literal war on information and it's a war on information on many, many fronts. You know, what is RFK going to do if he removes a bunch of people who are making decisions that he's now going to make, right?

Now he's going to make those decisions. An under qualified person is going to make these unilateral decisions about the United States health policy. And if we remove those people and they're not taking as good a count of those things, what will happen? What will happen after he's done? After he's done, if there's measles outbreaks of 10, 20, 30,000 people after he's done. If he, if, if after he's done, if there's measles outbreaks of 10, 20, 30,000 people after he's out of office, what can we do to go back and say that was

your fault? Right. Yeah. You know, we have to now rely on the media and we've seen the media multiple times be manipulated by this strong arm by this, the institutions that are in there now manipulated by these institutions, manipulated by foreign strong arm by this, the institutions that are in there now, manipulated by these institutions, manipulated by foreign institutions. We've seen all this happen. So how do we hold these people to account? Every day I'm reminded of more and more

about how important just winning is gonna be, how important that's gonna be, because you can't like losing right now. There's so much at stake. There's so much at stake with every loss. And if you lose in 2026, you lose the house again or whatever. If you don't take back and stop what's happening with getting back the house in the Senate. If you don't storm those places and have like just absolute takeover, you're gonna see more and more erosion

of just our knowledge as a country. And now you're gonna get an opportunity to see like, I mean, who knows? You might not be able to stem the tide when you come down to it in 2028. Yeah, and I think, you know, as these systems are put into place to restrict our access to knowledge, to reduce funding for foundational research

about the world and how the world works, this is costing us lives. Yeah. This is costing us lives. You know, every, you know, let's imagine something that is likely to be true, right? This is costing us lives. This is costing us lives. Let's imagine something that is likely to be true, right? Let's imagine that in 10 years, there is some disease, doesn't even matter which one for the thought experiment, there is some disease for which a new treatment arrives.

And that new treatment is based on some fundamental research that was done into how biology works, right? This happens all the time. Every day that we don't fund that research, somebody died of that illness that didn't have to. So if it takes us 10 years to do something that should have taken us five, that's five years worth of people dying

of something they didn't have to do. COVID is an example of something which has been, which is just a disease. All COVID is, is a disease. It's a virus that circulates. That's all it is. It is not just a disease. It is now a politics.

There is a politics around COVID. You can't even say the name of a virus anymore without recognizing that you are doing something political. It's not possible to use the word COVID without engaging in politics now. That's crazy, that's crazy, that's super intentional. That's not an accident. That is something which happened on purpose.

The more we allow that stuff to continue to happen, the more that there's no takesies, backsies on this stuff. Somebody's gonna die. Someone you know, maybe you, will die. We'll get sick. We'll not get better from it. We'll live a life of suffering that did not have to happen. We will be involved in conflicts,

which did not have to occur. People will be, you know, programs which fund, you know, fundamental, you know, life-saving nutritional programs, et cetera. These things, people are going to suffer and die because of the restriction of knowledge. Climate change. Climate change, man.

Just think about climate change. Oh my God, I know. I think about climate change, and I think about who's gonna be the one who suffers the most? It's gonna be the most vulnerable populations in the world yeah it's going to be the people who can't like if some fucking billionaire or millionaire loses their mansion that happens to be on the seafront right

what what was lost yeah right yeah somebody lost money but chances are it was insured or whatever insurance An insurance company lost money. Yeah, insurance company lost money or whatever. And probably not because they probably made a lot of money off of all those other people who didn't have their house washed away. Right. And they had to pay one out. Oh, well, once in a while they lose a little money. That's how insurance works. That's how insurance works.

What happens to all those people who have to live in that area that don't have millions of dollars to fall back on, insurance to fall back on. What happens to all those people when, you know, changes in weather change how much we can eat now? What happens to all that then? These are real questions that, you know, like burying your head in the sand, and we're doing even worse than just burying

our head in the sand, right? Like we're doing things that are worse than just ignoring climate change. We're actively trying to than just burying our head in the sand, right? Like we're doing, we're doing things that are worse than just ignoring climate change. We're actively trying to destroy record of climate change. Yeah. There's a difference between just burying your head in the sand or lighting all your books on fire. Yeah.

There's a huge difference, right? We're doing the latter. We're, we are actively going after ideas because they're too strong for us. In the marketplace, they would fucking own us. So in the marketplace of ideas, they have to be destroyed. And they have to be destroyed by not mentioning them, by removing them from the public consciousness, by removing them from public record,

making it so no one can understand these things ever again. And we're like, imagine that's where we are now from when we started the show. From when we started the show and we had this idea that like, gosh, the show won't even have to exist in 10 years because people will be rational. We'll be smarter than we were when we started this show. We are definitively more stupid as a nation

than when we started this show. We are definitively more stupid as a nation than when we started this show. There's been a, over the last 10 years, 2015 forward, there has been a steep and drastic and dangerous decline. And like, you could see, like, you could actually just, like, we have recent evidence that, like, during the Biden administration, a huge part of the work that the Biden administration

done did, which much of it was very, very good, was really catch up work to try to repair damage. Try to repair what you can. It takes an enormous amount of time. You know, if we defund NPR and PBS, you'd be a fool to think that we get all that back. You don't get it back. You don't get it the same way.

It's not how that works. No. If we destroy the Department of Education, it's not like we just all wake up and say, okay, well now we want it again. Yeah. Like if we damage these institutions of higher learning, if we change fundamentally who they are, how they operate,

what they're comfortable and what their fear level around honesty and intellectualism and research, if we change all of that stuff, if we tell them you are vulnerable. Yeah, they can't be fearless. Yeah, then how are they gonna teach us to be, how can we be taught to be fearless by the fearful?

Yeah, if you're afraid, you're not gonna be fearless. That's for sure. ["Fearless by the Fearful"] All right, that's gonna wrap it up for this week. We're gonna be back with a regular show on Monday, an actual show that we record within time of it being recorded. Hopefully nothing happens between now and then. God damn. I can't even imagine what we're gonna come back to. I can't even imagine. But we're gonna leave everybody than time of it being recorded. Hopefully nothing happens between now and then.

I can't even imagine what we're gonna come back to. I can't even imagine, but we're gonna leave everybody like we always do with the skeptic screen. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo quasi alternative, Acupuncturating,

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